


paper hearts

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Future Fic, Hotels, Phil Coulson: human disaster, Romance, collection of moments, poetic crap etc, skoulsonfest2k16redux
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-18
Updated: 2016-07-18
Packaged: 2018-07-24 19:47:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7520800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five pieces of paper.</p>
<p>Written for the Skoulson RomFest 2k16 Redux - Prompt: hotel rooms</p>
            </blockquote>





	paper hearts

**one**

On the border with Canada a hotel with deep dark wooden walls, he stares out the window to a scenery that reminds him of late night _Twin Peaks_ reruns, the rain coagulating on the leaves of the trees like blood. He’s tired from the trip alone and his jurisdiction only extends a couple of miles to the north. Right on the wild frontier, he thinks, humming a piece of music he’s not sure he remembers the title of, scribbling on the hotel’s stationary. The solo mission will do him good (he suspects Mack is getting tired of him). When he looks down from the dark treetops, the darker sky, he realizes he has been drawing tiny and perfectly formed daisies on the blank paper.

 

**two**

Territorial disputes once more, and this is not the first time Illinois and its insularity becomes a pain in the ass. He doesn’t know how much of the crime scene will be preserved by the time the local police give him the okay to visit tomorrow morning and he is preemptively annoyed by their incompetence, their calculated carefulness to look good on the news. The whole country treading on eggshells about the “Inhuman problem” (Coulson hates the way those words go together as if it’s natural, as if Inhumans can’t be anything other than a problem), no one wants to give up their piece of authority. But Coulson is an expert on this, and travelling alone gives him an unexpected edge: he can use his old tricks, disappear into Agent Phil Coulson, convivial everyman who will say “please” and “thank you” to people of less rank and experience and his smile will never slip. In a way he’s missed him, the poor guy, and he prepares to get into that suit and that skin while he waits in the hotel, examining the crime scene pictures obsessively. Doing everything obsessively these days. He’s sure the sheriff’s department would have messed something up by the time he gets there. It’s not arrogance or skepticism of locals, it’s experience.

More importantly; Coulson knows what to look for. He spreads the pictures over his bed, looking for the familiar pattern, getting used to this life on the road and on identically singular hotels, getting used to the loneliness again, being without a team, but with a purpose. An area of expertise, so to speak.

There’s a piece of paper captured in one of the crime scene pictures. It could be Daisy’s handwriting, but Coulson can’t trust himself to know it for sure, he sees her in everything these days, his own perception too warped. The words “ _keep following_ ” do sound like Daisy though, and when he does that, follow the trail of breadcrumbs local authorities can’t smell (Daisy being too good at this for them, too good for Coulson as well, which confirms the clues were not left carelessly), and two days later he finds a warehouse full of black market weapons modified for very specific purposes - anti-Inhuman science is advancing hand in hand with anti-Inhuman tech, and this is the result. It’s more than Daisy wanting him to take care of this, it’s an statement: this is happening.

Her message was completely superfluous (but when the ATCU retrieves the evidence, he keeps it - disappears it from the archives like he does with every piece that might put Daisy at risk). Of course he will keep following her.

 

**three**

He falls in love with her when he helps her hide, deep in some anonymous roadside lodge in Alaska, while he contemplates the curve of her back under the sheets and moves in nightmares, while the noiseless snow keeps falling, leaving them stranded, and blissfully safe, the landscape around them disappearing behind soft grayness.

_I need you_ she had said and Coulson never hesitated. Get me out of here and he didn’t spare a thought to career, laws, safety.

Daisy is more tired than injured, but she is injured, and Coulson listens to her sleep for hours, panicking at every irregularity in her breathing, at every toss and turn in her sleep. He feels like a thief, drinking in her sleeping frame after all these months of radio silence. He feels himself fall in love with her in that moment, missing her voice yet comforted by the noise of her aliveness, the way he has never felt alone when she is near. It’s hard to tear his gaze from her body curled into its smallest version, burrowed under the clothes she borrowed from him, at the edge of the only bed in the room, but Coulson knows he has to do something, be useful somehow, or he’ll lose his mind.

He knows he’ll have to leave her, go out for a while and get supplies, find a line that isn’t compromised. He makes a list - this motel has no paper, no elegant letterhead, so Coulson writes on the back of some pamphlet announcing the local views and tourist spots, all of them located in the surrounding towns, not this one. He could just use his phone but he feels like doing something with his hands (“you use the phone with your hands” he can almost hear Daisy protesting, because that’s the kind of thing she would say). He makes a mental inventory of what they have here. They’re going to need food, fresh bandages, alcohol. Daisy said she needed him. He wonders if that’s just a truth of convenience right now - she is not lying and she would never manipulate him - and realizes he doesn’t care. Five minutes or five days, it doesn’t matter for how long she needs him, he’s hers.

 

**four**

He wakes up with the taste of the curve of her shoulder in his mouth, a slight handover, west coast sun like sandpaper under his eyelids, heart and limbs swollen with joy, and a note on the pillow next to him that says she’s not abandoning him, she’s just gone to get them coffee, and it’s not like Coulson can ever forget how her handwriting looks like now.

 

**five**

She keeps fidgeting with the papers in her hand, crossing out lines, adding a word here and there. Pacing around the room. The elegant expensive room looking over Central Park, made a lovely mess, the bed sheets scattered, in the air a honeymoon-like scent of morning sex and freshly squeezed orange juice. Quake triumphantly received in the city she just saved from being razed to the ground by a Kree squad. Quake triumphant, Daisy Johnson anxiously soundlessly reading the words over and over, moving her lips, folding and unfolding the papers, adding another word, crossing three in exchange, wondering if the speech is too long already. Coulson watches her from the edge of the bed, too lazy to get dressed just yet, tugging at the belt of her too-dark suit, the way she wants to play respectability for the cameras, the only Inhuman _allowed_ to present their side of the story until now.

“You shouldn’t be so nervous, you’re an expert on this,” he tells her, grabbing her wrists to settle her down.

“What? Public speaking? Are you kidding?” Her face twists comically. Humbleness as a survival mechanism.

“You had a whole podcast on these matters,” he reminds her. “You spoke to people you didn’t know every week.”

“Yeah, to thirty weirdoes who subscribed.”

He looks at her. “I listened.”

Daisy smiles.

“Thirty- _one_ weirdoes, then.”

Coulson frowns at her and she kisses the frown away. He feels the tension ebb away from her shoulders as the kiss distracts her. “You’ll be fine,” he mutters encouragingly. Discreetly she shoves the papers into his hands as they kiss.

“I want you to read it first,” she says.

He looks down at the speech he has between his fingers. The printed words versus Daisy’s amendments in her small, practical handwriting. He feels honored.

“I don’t know what to say…”

“I figured you’d tell me if I need to put in some more jokes,” Daisy teases him.

“You want me to read it now?” he asks.

She nods. Coulson loops his arm around her waist and pulls her back to the bed. While she catches some extra minutes of sleep, burying her face in their pillow, wrinkling her suit in her careless happiness, he rests his chin on the small of his back and props the papers against her shoulder, reading the words and corrections, the thoughts from her beautiful mind.


End file.
